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Finding a collaborative partner. Part 1 – using the internet
Can you find a collaborator on the internet? There is no reason at all why long-distance collaboration should pose a problem with the many tools that we now have at our disposal. Many of the same rules for finding a collaborator still apply. You should not leap into action and commit to a large piece…
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Know Your Characters – Mr & Mrs
Canada has given many great gifts to the world, lacrosse, instant mashed potato, the pacemaker, the electric wheelchair… and Mr & Mrs. Created in 1963, Mr & Mrs was a TV show in which married couples were tested on their knowledge of each other through a series of questions. The questions were put to both…
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Know Your Characters
Writers, both solo and collaborative, need to get to know their central characters well before writing a novel about them. And the first question is not ‘how well?’ because the writer needs to know the central characters very well. The first question is which characters do they need to know a lot about and which…
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Creating Characters Collaboratively
In terms of creating interesting and viable characters, the first thing collaborators need to decide is how many central characters there are in the story. There are tracts on creative writing that say that any story has only one central character. It’s an interesting notion but an unhelpful one. Your novel will most likely feature…
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Greater than the sum of our parts?
We’re both really pleased with Clovenhoof. It needs editing and polishing but it’s clear that we have created something that we’re really proud of. If it is greater than the sum of our parts, how did that happen? I’m not sure I have all of the answers, but here are a few thoughts. Different skills…
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Clovenhoof v Draculas
Heide and I have been working on our collaborative novel since last autumn and we’re mere weeks away from finishing a healthy-looking draft of the entire thing. We’ve tackled the collaborative aspect of writing in our own way, simply doing what we felt was right and it’s been interesting to see how other people have…
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Index Card Games
I’ve used index cards (or file cards or postcards) as part of my fiction planning for at least the last ten years. They serve a number of really useful functions. Firstly, I can jot down on them ideas that I’ve no idea what to do with. I could be out and about and suddenly have…
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Chicken!
Actual chicken. Owned by Iain. I was hunting through old emails recently, looking for some detail that I knew we’d talked about, before we’d set up our Dropbox structure. Ancient History! I started to realise just how far we’d come, and how quickly. From the very first tentative shall we collaborate? email to having a…
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Digging to France
In 1990, a consortium of companies from both France and the United Kingdom completed the Channel Tunnel, a 31 mile undersea rail link between the two countries. It was a major engineering feat (regarded by the American Society of Civil Engineers as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World) and despite its ultimate success…
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People who inspired us
We blogged previously about what made us decide to collaborate. There was a workshop at Birmingham Writers Group where we explored some collaborative writing techniques, and talked about examples of famous writers who had made it work. I had wanted to try it for years, after reading the experiences of Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman…